Bloodsisters by John Russo

Bloodsisters
by John Russo
Pocket Books, 1982

A college student wants to know who her father is. Many, many pages later she's targeted by a figure from her past, then the book ends. We have many, many pages of astrology and placing want ads to fill out the length.

A couple of slit throats, not enough to be horror, more of a thriller that never gets started. Exposition heavy as always, Russo solves the mysteries either before or right after they're introduced. We know about the father from the opening sequence, and other elements that might have been a surprise, such as the transgender/split personality business, was just spelled out, with the characters themselves never learning about it.

There's an astrology based, feminist secret society, sometime intimated that controls sections of society, but ends up being 13 women who barely manage to cover up their own murders that they commit to cover up other murders. They don't play much in the plot either.

For the exciting conclusion, our heroine is kidnapped (off page), rescued (off page), and learns of the fate of her tormentors from the newspaper. The worst of Russo's that I've come across.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3YJVhWe

Black Cat by John Russo

Black Cat
by John Russo
1982 Pocket Books

Some good stuff from Russo.  After starting high with Midnight, I'd been disappointed with his other titles until this.  Like Midnight, Russo seems to be winging it and throwing in all kinds of elements.  We start with an adulterous writer, a 'Nam vet dying of Agent Orange, and an anti-colonial terrorist in Africa.

Russo throws in hitchhiker suspense, panther cult atrocities, stranded motorist schtick, animal attacks, and circus gothic.  Gory and dark, though the ending could use some trimming.

The Audible recording was OK, the sound quality wasn't the greatest and there's almost an hour of overlong pauses.

In Kindle for ebook and Audible audiobook from Amazon

Awakening by John Russo

Awakening
by John Russo
1983 Pocket Books

Doctor Benjamin Latham is executed for vampirism in late 18th century America.  He wasn't a vampire then, but the burial ritual prevented his soul from leaving his body and ironically causes him to be a pseudo-vampire.  He has mind control, can cloud men's minds like the Shadow, super strength, super resilience, and poisonous saliva.

Construction work disturbs his coffin and he comes to life in Pennsylvania.  After a little "man displaced in time" business like Time After Time, Latham settles into doing day labor and killing muggers every month for subsistence.  We get a lot of him experimenting with his powers, like a less entertaining version of The Greatest American Hero.

About halfway through the novel we switch gears and Latham tracks down his ancestors, only to find his great, great, etc grand nephew is a serial killer.  We follow the serial killer for a while, occasionally popping over to see if a detective cheats on his wife, and things just kind of fizzle out.

Russo's rambling plots are often refreshingly unpredictable, but here things just go nowhere.  Combined with his usual "tell don't show" style of storytelling, this was a hard one to get through.  It barely qualifies as horror, and even less as romance, which it was branded as in a 90s reissue.  On the plus side, Russo came out with a bad vampire novel and bad serial killer novel years before the glut that destroyed horror fiction.

Available in ebook for Kindle, currently in Kindle Unlimited, and available in audiobook from Audible.

The Booby Hatch by John Russo

The Booby Hatch
by John Russo
2014, Burning Bulb Publishing

A novelization of his own 1976 sex comedy, evidently written (or rewritten) almost 40 years later.  And it shows.  Sex comedies films tend to fail on both counts, and a print version of one doesn't even show skin.

The limited plot involves a stupid woman who works as a tester at a sex toy factory.  She lives with her closeted transvestite boyfriend and ends up with a male tester who is having impotence problems.  Mostly, she just gets raped a lot.  And not in a dubious, Benny Hill kind of way.  Full on violent rape by sexual predators.  Hilarious stuff.

To make it more uncomfortable, Russo steps in as narrator to add some commentary to imply that he knows that maybe this isn't that funny of a topic in 2014, then proceeds to do it anyway.  The same could be said for the wacky Italian dialect.

Escape of the Living Dead by John Russo

Escape of the Living Dead
by John Russo
Kensington, 2013

I've seen this referred to as the novelization of the 2006 comic.  It isn't.  I think this is a long unpublished third installment to Night and Return of the Living of the Living Dead, partly updated to 2013ish.  It's set 16 years after the original outbreak (or an original outbreak - the book isn't explicitly a sequel) so I'm guessing it was originally set circa 1985, but Russo puts more effort into updating this one than some of the other that he's recently reissued.

A scientist bit during the original outbreak manages to survive and gives birth to a couple of vampire girls.  They use hired thugs to kidnap victims to experiment on, and when the police close in on them, a truckload of zombies (he uses the Z word) escapes.

I enjoy Russo's rambling plotlines, but other readers may be less charitable.  The hero of our story gets written out early, major characters get killed off page, but if you think of it as more of a Slacker or Twenty Bucks with zombies, it goes better.

Some criminals save a Catholic school, and some Aryan Brotherhood hoodlums hole up in a bar.  It's decidedly small scale, and it implies that in the Russo-verse, Night of the Living Dead was a localized outbreak quickly contained.

It's packaged with the superior Midnight and way too expensive as of this writing.

The Academy (aka Day Care) by John Russo

The Academy (Originally Day Care)
by John Russo
1985 Pocket Books / 2014 Burning Bulb Publishing

Too Much Horror Fiction

Students at an exclusive academy get brain implants as part of a secret government program.  Someone has discovered how to manipulate the implants, and uses this knowledge to fulfill his own twisted desire for sex and violence.  A lot of the background comes from the real life work of Dr. Jose Delgaldo.


John Russo once again has an apparent stand-in character, a commercial director who dreams of supporting himself with his writing and is in a bitter divorce with his overbearing wife.  There's that nasty undercurrent of unpleasant sleaziness present in all of Russo's works, and a titch of gore this time.

Along with many of Russo's books, they've been recently made available in affordable Kindle editions.  This one was "updated" and renamed - a record is called a "CD" before going back to being a record, and a specific date is changed.  But we've still got dial-up hacking, home computers are new and expensive, there's a "home video box", and the idea of a woman doctor is a novelty - sounds dated by even 1985's standards.  I think they would have been better off just keeping the original setting, as the entire story has issues if it's set in 2014.

Author Overview - John Russo

John Russo, as you will be reminded on the cover of every book listed below, is the author of Night of the Living Dead, which he kind of was, and he's milking that for everything it's worth.  In addition to his fiction, he's written non-fiction, scripts, comics, and been involved in multiple film projects.

His fiction, at least what I've read, has an emphasis on character studies which sometimes drags on to padding, occasional meandering storylines, and some sleazy elements.  He manages more creepiness than thrills.

Recently he's been making his work available for ebook at reasonable prices.  About half of the below are available on Kindle Unlimited as well.

1974: Night of the Living Dead
1977: Return of the Living Dead
1979: Majorettes
1980: Midnight - my review
1981: Limb to Limb - my review
1982: Bloodsisters
1982: Black Cat
1983: The Awakening
1985: Day Care - updated and enhanced as The Academy
1985: Return of the Living Dead (Novelization version)
1986: Inhuman
1987:Voodoo Dawn
1988: Living Things
1995: Hell's Creation
2011: Channel 666 in The Big Book of Bizarro Horror Collection
2013: Escape from the Living Dead (novelization of the comic)
2013: Murder, Mayhem, Mystery (short stories)
2014: Dealey Plaza
2014?: The Booby Hatch - movie originally from 1976

Limb to Limb by John Russo

Limb to Limb
by John Russo
1981 Pocket Books

From Vault of Horror

A ballerina loses a leg in a train accident.  Her rich father hires two unscrupulous doctors to steal and reattach another ballerina's leg, using methods they learned from Nazi concentration camps.

There are some moments of sleazy creepiness, such as rapist kidnappers and the doctors stealing fetuses from pregnant women, but most of it is at the made-for-TV-movie level of mild thriller.  Lots of padding, plenty of expanded character studies of people that don't especially matter to the story, and not a lot going on.

Midnight

Midnight
John Russo
1980 Pocket Books

The children of satan worshipers grow up and kidnap victims to use in a ceremonial sacrifice.  It was relatively tame in terms of horror or exploitation, but it has a slimy film of sleaze and nihilism that appeals to me.  The book rambled about following various characters, often waiting several chapters before they entered the main narrative.  These sections were engaging enough character studies, but I can see how it may strike some readers as padding, especially for a book with this low of a body count.

Written by the co-creator of the Night of the Living Dead, Russo directed the film version a couple years later.



One gripe is that the book brings up the Holocaust in a couple of places, to compare it with the horrors the characters are going through.  It doesn't make the book any scarier or give it any gravitas, and just makes Russo a bit of a jerk for bringing it up.